


Living in a Daydream: Notes on Completing the Woso Little Big Bang Challenge (Again)

by ashheaps



Category: Women's Soccer RPF
Genre: Comparative Writing Process, Meta, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-23
Updated: 2014-08-23
Packaged: 2018-02-14 13:54:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2194215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashheaps/pseuds/ashheaps
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here, I decompress the writing process and explain what went into the fic I submitted for the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/collections/woso_little_big_bang_summer_14"> Woso Little Big Bang Challenge 2014.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Living in a Daydream: Notes on Completing the Woso Little Big Bang Challenge (Again)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [So Pleased With a Daydream (Now Living Is No Good)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2172117) by [ashheaps](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ashheaps/pseuds/ashheaps). 



Since this challenge has provided me with ample opportunities to produce some of my longest works, I wanted to take some time to reflect back on the process of completing an lbb, the nitty gritty of trying for the challenge for the second consecutive summer, and the obstacles and reservations that I managed to bypass with the help from a superb support network.  


This year, I knew I would have to be disciplined. Since I was absolutely lucky to get the opportunity to experience a professional league first hand as a Dash sth, I knew that a lot of free time would be spent on the pursuit of this experience over the summer. Since I was doing a lot of driving back and forth alone at the beginning of the challenge, most of my brainstorming came from a place of quiet contemplation. I think this is why I ended up choosing a future setting that also had personal implications and memories attached. Because I was essentially engaging in that act that comes ingrained in rpf: surmising an incarnation of a character in a setting that is intensely personal.  


In contrast, while writing [Thirst for Salt](http://archiveofourown.org/works/975900) (TfS), a lot of my brainstorming came from peer-to-peer interactions. I did not have the same access to the domestic league, so I was engaging in the community based on the access I could find through tumblr, streams, and other platforms for exchange driven by fannish-content. Official pages and stats and game records only go so far, and eventually, so do official circulated photos. I think this is a function of the time frame in which each story takes place. Because TfS exists in an established tournament with an established canonical outcome, I was more successful in creating that back story when I reached out to gather different points of view on the setting. Being able to dig back in tumblr archives, or even just generic image searches, was helpful in understanding the fanon of the team at the time I was working on TfS, and ultimately meant that I was doing some conscious reinterpretation of canonical sources.  


It is worth noting that last year, I found the offish!ussf website to be a great resource for timelining purposes. There was a blog that was extremely useful in helping me come up with settings, physical places to drop in some of my ideas for dialogue. That blog has since been removed from the parent page, and it did sadden me greatly to see my link dead when I went back this summer.  


Now, during my work in this year's lbb, I committed myself to a setting that did not have the crutch of an established time frame to write within. (During TfS, I was obsessive about tracking the city changes of the wc tournament, the weather, the daily activities as I understood them through the blog, the routine to which I was consciously supplying an undercurrent.) I suppose I didn't have the full responsibility of an entirely AU world building fic, but I knew that I would have to get enough distance from the canon I was referencing throughout the writing process for the sake of the fic's longevity. It had to diverge at some point, and I essentially had to skate that line between my characters reminiscing and rebuilding. And that's a really tough balance to undertake, because you want to remain true to the fanon that you expect your readers to approach the fic knowing, but you also want to make sure that the reader can see where you might've drawn certain implications that extend the commonly accepted canon.  


This happened in a minute way with TfS, especially once I found media that at least contained the source material I was working with cohesively. (I think it's interesting that I've only found one truly candid photo of the three characters in frame together, and it's [this one](http://31.media.tumblr.com/f06d36c622fafef7d6cbaf7395982d51/tumblr_mkrarsWHdh1qzechoo1_500.png). I think it's so befitting to the spirit of TfS. The implicit dread in the reader already knowing how the actual plot will end clashed against the obvious ecstasy of the narrative.)  


During the TfS writing, I also would see things in a new light once I picked up on cues that didn't seem to stick when I first came in contact with some material from the time period. I think this is one of the greatest rewards of extensive fic research: being stimulated by things you might've thought irrelevant beforehand. I think it establishes a way for the author to understand that each reader will come with different points of view and different memories and associations. Fic writing then seems to be an exercise in juggling those approaches. Recognizing a reader's mind and then using that to further your authorial voice.  


I was in a different position with this year's lbb project. Because I was up to my own devices in creating a storyline, I didn’t have a concrete team/place/set of characters that I could rely on and research their interactions. I began to look to my own experiences with India for help with setting. Originally, I wanted to create a bigger canonically divergent setting, which is why most of my early brainstorming/floating scene writing took place with the idea that the characters would be involved in a new age commune style of living. In my research of this idea (based off a truly original township called Auroville which still entices me in theory), I realized that a criticism would be unavoidable should I use this setting. And eventually, this criticism reared it’s head in the “safer” setting which I settled on. That criticism being: this [auroville, in this case] isn’t what India is really like.  


Perhaps a European-dominant colony in central India isn’t exactly a far off metaphor for the great tension that is the independent nation of India. But I also knew that I would be in for additional research that I took for granted in writing a city that I’d personally visited. Sometime after my first few thousand words, I realized I needed to bring the characters closer, and thereby needed to give myself the cushion of establishing a setting that would come easily to me. I knew the Big Grand Points I wanted to make, and if I could make them in a place where I knew how to describe a subtle setting, then I could focus my authorial hand on the verisimilitude of the characters in their dialogue and actions, which is essentially how I pulled off Thirst for Salt.  


I began to go back through my own travelogues of the time spent in India--rereading my journals and poems from the time. While looking there, I became really embarrassed by my own language that I used to describe my experiences. I wanted so badly to avoid cultural appropriation in my narrative, but I could see it in black and white in my own journal. My obsession with and simultaneous indifference to the culture around me was obvious. I described events where Indians approached my Western group of students with consternation, events where I could not appreciate the beauty around me because of my own conscious othering. And even when I could appreciate the aesthetic value, how wrong that felt to reduce the experience to just that. I ultimately rutted up against the same emotional quandaries that I was describing in my journal while writing the fic. I wanted experience to be the basis for the fic, but I wanted to rewrite my own at the same time.  


In my journal, I recounted a mental breakdown I had unknowingly blocked out of my quick recall that I used to skate towards the first half of my fic before the first checkpoint. The breakdown seemed to come out of nowhere, for in the preceding entries I had been so glib, so matter of fact about my own Western point of view. But when it all came to a head--inspired by a bout of sickness and boredom, it was like I was unable to see myself as anything but judgemental and vain. I knew the thinness of my own appearance, of my brief time there masquerading as a student but really just a tourist. Just a visitor to a place that I didn’t understand, a place that I tried to learn but also could not know. I felt like I was capitalizing on the wrong things, exalting my Western self in an unspoken condemnation of the “other” way of life. Even now, recalling the physical experiences there--the heat, the sweating, the dizziness one afternoon at a sunsoaked fort on a hill--I’m reminded of the great dread which I navigated during that time. A kind of preservation that was predicated on the assurance that “I’d be home soon.” Back to normal. Normal. I wanted to get rid of the implication that my life was the right way to live, but I couldn’t when it was initially hard to appreciate the temporarily adopted way of living that pushed me out of my comfort zone.  


I experienced an emotional shift during my own pivotal time in India. I think that’s why I felt okay to keep going, keep writing my characters to do the same. I knew that they needed narrative distance from each other, too, because I knew the setting would have to be where they reconnected with themselves and also each other. I knew the power that was inherent in the country I’d chosen to pay homage to, and I knew that such understanding could come at a price, even if I wasn’t making the right strides in my narrative towards it quite yet.  


At the second checkpoint, I was not ready. Not ready for the check-in, not ready for the idea of putting any part of this fic out there. Not ready for the story to end, but that meant that I had not allowed the story to begin properly. And not ready to give it up, I guess, because I did not want to let my own reservations keep me from crafting a story that explored reconstruction, realigning with the self in light of crucial, pivotal events in one’s life. One of the most consistent tips I’ve ever received while writing is to leave the introduction until the end. Because once you’ve written the depth of your conclusion, you’ll be able to construct your beginning to foreshadow the work you establish later on. I would ultimately not take this advice, because, just like my own trip to India, I was not sure how things would end, but I knew when they would.  


I should also say that this is the point when music became integral to finishing the bang. The Bright Eyes album “Cassadaga” came back into rotation. The themes seemed obvious in their parallels: transformation, a personal journey without any set boundaries, rediscovering your own narrative while you voyage on into an unknown territory. Knowing that the experience will unveil something about yourself, but not knowing what that revelation would look like.  


I do believe that So Pleased With a Daydream is one of those fics that is rewarding when you allow yourself to get caught inside of it. I used a lot of repetition throughout the fic for many reasons, but mostly I think this establishes a kind of meditative quality that enhances the dreaminess of the narrative. I structured a lot of sentences and paragraphs in similar ways to recall that kind of consideration, to make them read like mantras that keep evolving, becoming known and then unknown just as quickly. But because of that, the first section is (close to) painfully long and detailed, which made me wonder if I would lose a lot of readers when things just wouldn’t move fast enough. I felt like it was important to dissect that initial shock of adjusting to life in a new place. To replicate that kind of intense scrutiny that happens when you’re just not sure what to do with your body in space and time. With your efforts. With your thoughts. That’s why Sinead is the introductory character--her thoughts are paramount to understanding the world the characters are in, but eventually her thoughts are inaccessible to both the reader and the other characters. There’s always that uncertainty, always that bug in the back of your mind that will tell you that your experiences aren’t THE truth, just your truth, however fallible you see that. I think that’s why I tried to really keep track of the spaces I was leaving open, about things that could transpire in those later spaces that I could reference instead of supply. This has always been a literary technique I admired--weaving an implied backstory in with an available narrative, and showing how characters navigate that primordial property of time itself.  


I hope you can understand where I’m coming from in this reflective analysis, because it seemed to be especially draining to consider some crucial missteps I could be treading close to during the writing process. Maybe I wrote this as a big disclaimer to myself later, seeing my own attempts at the complex negotiations of a Westerner visiting a place like India that is both so welcoming and also inspires such ingrained guilt and self-consciousness to come to light while experiencing the country. I knew that I was writing some of my own self into this piece too, some of that wandering and searching, some of that uncertainty with how the chips might fall at the end. With how a chain of decisions can change the course of life and how profoundly we think of our own narrative as it coordinates with those around us.  


I worked in intense closeness with my primary beta on this fic, and I don’t think nearly enough people are fortunate enough to have that kind of relationship with an editor of their work. One of the biggest obstacles in finishing this fic was my own reluctance, and having a beta that knows exactly where to point out your successful moments is paramount in overcoming that. This also meant I had to give my beta unfiltered access to the working document, because the last third of my allowed writing time was incredibly touch-and-go. I couldn’t write an ending without considering the kind of revelations the characters needed to get to, and I couldn’t do that until I gave each relationship ample space to occupy. I am fortunate that my beta has an equally vast understanding of the canon I wanted to consider in this fic, and I think that really helped to have a second opinion regarding elements of the characters that I wanted to address. It’s also a luxury of RPF writing that I don’t know is available to other authors, so it is a cushion that I gratefully use to achieve narrative cohesion.  


It seems silly to say I was worried about word count when I look back at the published fic, because I came close to an additional 10k of writing with the finished product. But I think I felt similar pressure with similar results during last year’s lbb. I think this is one of the stipulations of the challenge that was much more pressing to me this year because of the mod’s decision to offer word count guidelines from the beginning of the challenge. Having those checkpoints with concrete numbers that you _really really should_ hit at that time is the best way to keep pace during a challenge like this one. And then, once I did meet the required minimum, I still felt like I had strides that needed to be made, and quickly. I think I, just by nature, am editorially minded, because I reread a lot of my own work and actively resist the temptation to go back in to edit out some wordiness. (like this sentence, later, right before I choose to publish this) But I will say that I would not have had the sense of urgency had it not been for the caveat of the challenge that was something of a touchstone to remind me of the empirical nature of the accomplishment.  


And, as a final note, I think I must ultimately apologize to fandom in the way that I had to figuratively apologize to India during this writing process. I didn’t mean to take advantage of a supposition that the domestic league will fold in 2015, but I did discover the emotional basis for a canonical event that I myself did not have the misfortune of experiencing as an active member of fandom at the time the WPS suspended operations. Supposition is a helpful exercise in maturity, I think, and it allowed me to maybe understand the value of the league as I was able to interact with it in Houston all throughout the process of writing the fic. As I face a potential personal shift that might indeed shift me away from such access to the league, I can absolutely say that the opportunities afforded to me in conjunction with each other this summer are some that I hope I don’t soon gloss over in current journals and logues. The value of exchanging information and also coming to some on your own is really paramount in having a respectful, content savvy fandom. I personally want to commit my energies to fostering that kind of community, and I think the LBB is another platform that similarly inclined authors can express their own way of connecting the dots, of showing what that might mean for someone to engage and reinterpret the narrative to fit their own purposes. And the grace with which we contain that experience is all up to us; our travelogues and our comments and our platforms are sacred places and we need to constantly remind ourselves of the way in which we go about coming to know these spaces. What it would be like to look upon it with foreign eyes, what it would look like to finally feel welcomed and valued in such a space.  


In closing, thanks again for sticking with me through this analysis and soapboxing. If you have questions about my experience in India, or you just want to talk a little more about the themes referenced here and elsewhere, then I invite you to message me and share your own reiteration of the content and all implications. I hope that you’ve been able to see that this process of creating a fanwork has deeply personal implications for me and for so many others than engage with the source material in whatever way they choose. The value of interpersonal exchanges is of the greatest premium to me as I deconstruct what I consider to be a difficult desire to wield--that desire to negotiate place and point of view in the grand scheme of things, and how intensely I feel the need to attempt to write it all down. Best wishes on your own journeys and may you always see the merit in your own unique position in this world.  



End file.
